Every day I experience life in the world of healthcare IT, supporting 3000 doctors, 18000 faculty, and 3 million patients. In this blog I record my experiences with infrastructure, applications, policies, management, and governance as well as muse on such topics such as reducing our carbon footprint, standardizing data in healthcare, and living life to its fullest.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

The Implementation Workgroup Starter Kit

On March 8, the Implementation Workgroup of the HIT Standards Committee held a day of hearings as part of the effort to create an "Implementation Starter Kit" which accelerates EHR adoption and interoperability.

The goals of the hearing were to

* Describe challenges and successes that may be instructive to others.

* Provide advice to help others with implementation.

* Contribute tools and technologies that can be made available to the public and private sector, such as roadmaps, blueprints.

5. Lengthen the current implementation timelines in key challenging areas such as reporting of quality data.

6. Develop standards for data exchange that ensure that the data will be trusted such as rich metadata (who created the data, for what purpose in what workflow), further definition of the transport layer, and message routing standards. Exporting the data is easy, but how do we trust the inbound data into our systems from an external source (i.e., HIE)? What data should be in a PHR? What is the interplay between the state privacy laws and interoperability?

7. Drive collaboration between the software vendors to advance ARRA.Host an EMR software vendor summit to create synergies between vendors.

8. Create detailed implementation guidance for interoperability standards. Additional standards will be required for some use cases such as HIEs communicating with other HIEs.

9. Leverage open source models, where practical, such as the work of the Veterans Administration.

10. Innovate to improve speed of adoption.New business models and innovation are required. Utilize disruptive innovation to accelerate the road to adoption of meaningful use.

Tomorrow, the HIT Standards Committee will hear the report from the Implementation Workgroup and I'll post those materials, as well as a full summary of the meeting.